This is how I feel

And probably the reason why this blog is not yet up and running, I am mentally working on it though... In the meanwhile. go watch the Onion!

TRIPS

Last night I spent a few hours reading Vandana Shiva`s (2001) book “Protect or Plunder? Understanding Intellectual Property Rights.” Shiva is an Indian ecological scientist and activist, and someone I greatly admire. Last year I was even so lucky to hear her speak here in Oslo, the topic was then GMO and her deep resistance. Shiva fights for ecological multitude and for the right of the poor, and in this book she illustrates the inherent unfairness of TRIPS (the agreement on trade related aspects of intellectual property rights) and the consequence it has on people, nature and knowledge.

Officially, the WTO states that ‘intellectual property rights are the rights given to people over the creations of their minds’, this argument rests on an underlying assumption that knowledge can be regarded as a commodity, that it is something that can be sold and bought in the market and that both individuals and corporations can own ideas or inventions. TRIPS is in this way based on a Western understanding of property rights, which again is deeply rooted in classic political economy and goes back to the like of Hobbes, Smith, but also Marx. A second major rationale behind TRIPS is that it is required if we want to ensure innovation and continue to produce bigger and better goods (incl. food and medicine), or in other words: progress will stop. Otherwise? Economic growth will slow down and development will be impossible. Well, according to Shiva, Western economic growth might (rightly) slow down, but development will surely be possible.

Shiva illustrates how TRIPS have given individuals and corporations alike the right to own the very blueprint of life; seeds and genes (yes! even the breast cancer gene) is patented, and she asks how can this be justified? When knowing that another of the commons, namely water, has turned into a lucrative commodity, perhaps one could argue that that the right to property has destroyed the right to life?

Secondly, one can ask if knowledge or ideas can be owned in the first place, do they rather not belong to everyone, as all knowledge is fluid and always relies on previous knowledge? And what about people who are unaware or unable to copyright or seek patents? For individuals and societies in developing countries this is very much the case, century old traditions believed to belong to everyone is suddenly “discovered” or “invented” by big corporations. Shiva calls this bio-piracy:

Multinational corporations are able to make use of this (indigenous) knowledge commercially without any way acknowledging or compensating the indigenous people from whose knowledge and resources the commercial application was developed.

Furthermore, indigenous people are in many cases forced to purchase these “new inventions” for which they no longer have any entitlements. I am in no way capable of re-representing Shiva`s arguments with such enthusiasm and vigour as she herself does, I therefore recommend that you read her work and check out her website: http://www.navdanya.org/. But let us not forget that stories, like the one of the neem tree, do give hope! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/745028.stm)

In the name of Development

I am not yet sure what form this blog will take, or which purpose it will serve, but it will be a place for me to put down thoughts, quotes, rants and analysis of Development. I have a master in international development studies, and am highly influenced by so-called post-development theory. Post-development was meant as a critique of the impasse in development studies; an impasse i am still very much lost in: my entries here might therefore at times be conflicting; building on a feeling of hopelessness and despair. Post-development made me loose faith in justice and development, and in many ways I stopped "thinking", so by starting this blog I am hoping that I will regain my thoughts, if not my beliefs. To set the scene i will open with a quote of the foremost post-development writer, Arturo Escobar:

...development can be described as an apparatus (disportif) that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention, resulting in the mapping and production of Third World societies.